Trivia / Batman: Dark Tomorrow

• Feelies: The game comes with a limited edition comic book.
• Troubled Production: In Matt McMuscles' Wha Happun? video on the game, Dave Vout, an employee for support studio HotGen, revealed several details on the game's development and how it negatively impacted the final product:
  • The game's producer, Yuki Takamuki, was a visual effects artist for film and television with no experience in games before or since, which resulted in his prioritizing of story, cutscenes, and music over basic gameplay functions such as the camera.
  • Furthermore, Kemco, then a small-scale Japanese company that primarily published games, were inexperienced with developing big-budget titles for the Western market, resulting in severe technical issues and lack of resources behind the scenes. To name just one instance of the technical issues behind the scenes, Vout recalled discovering that the enemy AI was programmed using a Game Boy Advance emulator because Kemco's employees primarily worked with handhelds before and were accustomed to GBA coding.
  • Due to the game's nightmarish development, the initial concept for an ambitious open-world game was scrapped and hastily retooled into a linear stealth game using the assets available, while a planned PlayStation 2 port was cancelled entirely. Additionally, Vout, who was initially hired to work on the Xbox port of the game, ended up doing significant work on the Nintendo Gamecube version just to get it in a workable state to begin porting it to Xbox.
  • The game went through multiple delays before being released with minimal advertising (as a result of Kemco burning through the game's budget) and met with scathing reviews. The failure of the game devastated the studios involved: Kemco's American branch lingered on for a few more years before Kemco dissolved the studio and pivoted exclusively to Japan-only mobile games, while HotGen never worked on another noteworthy game again.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Word of God has it that Batman: Dark Tomorrow was originally going to be an open world game, similar to the movie licensed Spider-Man 2 game, and was also going to be a GameCube-exclusive. The game underwent massive delays and was eventually released as a multi-platform game, and as a more linear stealth-based game.
  • A PlayStation 2 version was in development before being scrapped.